Publisher's Synopsis
Since the pioneering studies of Michel Foucault in the 1960s, the topic of madness has received an increasing amount of attention from critics and historians. "Lucid Interval" draws on research in establishing a distinctive approach to the relationship between madness and culture.;Ranging in time and place from medieval England and Renaissance Italy to 19th-century France, this book examines a number of writers who have expressed in poetry and autobiography their own experiences of madness. Approaching them from a broadly socio-historical viewpoint, George MacLennan argues, through detailed analyses of their writings, that they bear witness to a gradually increasing degree of psychological inwardness in Western culture. This is a process which decisively affects both how madness is experienced and how it is expressed in writing.
